Monday, June 29, 2015

My 21st Century Mind Blown

Practicing Our Peace Sign Emblems

This is the second week of school, and it is going by pretty quickly. During my class today, we continued our lecture on emotions. I learned about six "basic" emotions of psychology: anger, happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, and surprise. Five out of the six emotions are in Inside Out, a movie that we may be watching this week. But disregarding that sentence, we learned about emblems such as the peace sign, thumbs up sign, and the "okay" sign. Professor Gilovich also taught us about the difference in expression between Western cultures and Eastern cultures. In a study, Tsai et al (2007), Tsai, Louie, Chen, and Uchide did a study of smile preference. Participant had to choose which smile, an excited smile or a calm smile, showed more excitement; the result was that an average of Westerners chose the excited smile, and East Asians picked the calm smile. Why? This can be due to how Western cultures and Eastern cultures view happiness. Eastern cultures see their emotions like a roller coaster, going up and down, but it is best presented as the yin and yang symbol of harmony. Western cultures see happiness as a uphill slope. Western cultures promote uniqueness and influence, independence, while Eastern cultures promote observation and adjustment, interdependence. One idea t-hat I value about Eastern cultures is their idea of harmony, and for Western cultures is their expressive emotions. After our lecture, we went to our section where we received our test scores.

We were all a bit depressed when receiving our test scores, but what impressed me was our topic, "The Psychology of Failure...." How coincidental for this to be our subject of the day, but I learned a lot from this, such as the increment and entity theory. The increment theory of smartness is that smartness is something that we can increase overtime; on the other hand. the entity theory of smartness states that smartness can not be increased. For the entity theory, it is either you have intelligence or you don't. There are two types goals for both theories, the learning goal and the performance goal. The learning goal, which reflects the increment theory, is where we attempt to increase our competence. Those who believe in the theory will choose to do challenging tasks to learn new skills and extend mastery in a skill. The challenge is thought to better oneself. For the performance goal, which is for the entity theory, we establish adequacy of an ability. People who practice this goal tend to do easier tasks that will portray their proficiency in the skill, to avoid negativity. Some can say that the increment theory is more optimistic, and the entity theory is more pessimistic. An activity we did in class was to rate different attributes on a scale from 1-12, 1 being most valuable, and 12 being least valuable. This is the self affirmation paper that bolsters our identity and our self esteem by noting important aspects and elements of our identification. Cohen et al (2006) is where Steve got the experiment from; and the result of the experiment showed that students who did the self affirmation intervention did better in mathematics than students who didn't go (the control group). After learning about the theories of intelligence, I experienced a mind blown.

I feel more energized, more motivated to work harder for the next test; I will do this because I can do it. Moving on, I went to the Cornell bookstore to get my sweater today. I was excited, and happy with my choice, but I won't be showing the blog what I got until the picture on Wednesday. I am enjoying learning what I do in psychology. I just noticed that doing these blogs are a great review for me, and it teaches you, the readers, what I learn. Let's work hard this week!